Lots of Pride, a Little Prejudice
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
In 1979 about 100 people gathered at the Gramercy Park Hotel for the
inaugural gathering of the Jane Austen
Society of North America, dressed in a style
The New Yorker summed up as “dinner dresses, subdued-looking jewelry,
comfortable-looking jackets.”
When the society took its annual meeting to the Marriott in Downtown
Brooklyn last weekend for a kind of homecoming, things were rather different.
Attendance was over 700, the event lasted three days, and the daytime dress
code for many ran to pale Regency dresses, demure bonnets and straw baskets to
hold anything that wouldn’t fit into a period-correct reticule.
“This is a place where people can let their Jane Austen freak flag fly,”
said Julia Matson of Minneapolis, the creator of an Austen-themed tea line (Mr. Darcy: “a bold beginning, yet a smooth finish”), who was at
her third meeting.
It was also a place to go back to the texts, and this year Jasna, as the
society is known, lined up some unusually heavy hitters to deliver the plenary
lectures on the meeting’s theme of power, money and sex.
Cornel West, a self-described Jane Austen fanatic, brought down the house with a thunderous Saturday morning sermon
on Austen’s understanding of human suffering that name-checked Sophocles,
Shakespeare, Chekhov and Leo Strauss. Sandy Lerner, a co-founder of Cisco
Systems and the founder of Chawton House
Library (near the Hampshire cottage where
Austen wrote some of her novels), lectured on Austen’s faulty understanding of
cash.
But it was the novelist Anna Quindlen who set the tone for the weekend
with a rousing keynote address lamenting two centuries of male condescension to
Austen’s seemingly small domestic dramas.
“It burns me that there were only men at the funeral,” Ms. Quindlen
said, noting that Austen’s gravestone at Winchester Cathedral made no mention
of her books. She also recalled another man who wanted to bury Austen, a
professor at Barnard in the ’60s who dismissed Austen as a “a second-tier
novelist” — something he wouldn’t say now, Ms. Quindlen said, even if he were
probably still thinking it.
It was an insult that the overwhelmingly female audience, some of whom
hissed at Ms. Quindlen’s mentions of Jonathan Franzen and “the dismissive label
chick-lit,” seemed to take personally. Austen, in fact, had many early male champions, and the term “Janeite” — coined by the critic George Saintsbury in
1894 — was embraced by male fans like Rudyard Kipling, who wore it with pride.
But in the 20th century it came to be applied to the “wrong” kind of reader:
overly effusive, academically untrained and often female.
In her new book, “Jane Austen’s Cults and
Cultures,” the Princeton University scholar Claudia
L. Johnson traces the gap between academics and everyday Austen fans to D. W.
Harding’s seminal 1940 essay, “Regulated Hatred,” which
suggested that Austen herself would have despised the besotted readers who
failed to recognize that her novels were about the “eruption of fear and hatred
into the relationships of everyday social life.”
There was certainly no hatred in Brooklyn, where the emphasis was
squarely on sisterly celebration of the woman whom Henry James backhandedly
called “everybody’s dear, Jane.”
At a well-attended workshop called “Dressing the Miss Bennets,” Lisa
Brown, a proofreader and Royal Navy expert from Rochester, walked attendees
through the basics of Regency attire.
“It’s all about the lift,” she said, pointing to a modern push-up bra on
an inflatable dummy named Lydia, after the airhead of the Bennet family. “The
most important thing to achieving this look is your undergarment.” Ms. Brown
added that a proper Regency lady would have worn crotchless panties, if she
wore them at all. (Pulling them down to use the toilet was too complicated.)
In 1991 the scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick drew headlines for her paper “Jane Austen and the
Masturbating Girl,” which was widely derided
as epitomizing the excesses of postmodern theory. If such provocative
presentations were hardly on the schedule last weekend, audiences were not
entirely unreceptive to readings that probed underneath the seemingly decorous
surfaces of Austen’s novels.
Mary Ann O’Farrell, a professor of English at Texas A&M University,
giving her first lecture to the society (on manners in Austen), said she was
surprised that a reference to her recent paper “ ‘Bin Laden a Huge Jane
Austen Fan’: Jane Austen in Contemporary Political Discourse” drew a big laugh.
“People here are much more sophisticated readers of Austen than the
world gives them credit for,” she said. “They are willing to think critically,
in both senses of the word.”
Some scholars at the meeting said senior colleagues had discouraged them
from getting too involved with the group, lest they get caught up in “effusions
of fancy,” as one put it — or worse, photographed in costume. And certainly the
event can produce some culture shock.
“When I first came, as a graduate student, I was kind of freaked out by
the level of ardor,” said Juliette Wells, an associate professor at Goucher
College and the author of “Everybody’s Jane,” a
study of Austen and pop culture. “I wasn’t sure if I would come back.”
But the society, Ms. Wells said, “has been very good to me,” a point
echoed by other scholars who cited its research grants and peer-reviewed
journal, Persuasions. Even more important, they say, is the chance to speak to
an audience that has done all the reading — sometimes 20 or 30 times.
Attendees’ knowledge often goes far beyond Austen’s six novels. During a
talk on mercenary motives in Austen’s fiction (which included a handout listing
all the known financial information given about 40 characters), Marilyn
Francus, an associate professor at West Virginia University, wondered aloud how
everyone would know at the beginning of “Pride and Prejudice” that Mr. Darcy
had £10,000 a year.
One audience member shouted out that detailed information about
inheritances was published in newspapers, as part of the probate process.
Another noted that gentlemen sometimes had to list their income publicly, as
proof of credit.
“I learn so much from these people,” Ms. Francus said. “I would never
dare condescend to a Jasna audience.”
In her bin Laden paper (which appears in the new scholarly collection “Uses of
Austen”), Professor O’Farrell of Texas A&M
examines the way “ugly couplings” like the best-selling mash-up “Pride and
Prejudice and Zombies” draw easy laughs at the expense of the typical Austen
devotee, who is presumed to be a dotty bluestocking seeking escape from modern
life. The modern world certainly seemed far away at Saturday’s Regency Ball,
which began with a hearty toast to “our goddess, the divine Jane Austen” and
included several hours of English country dances, like the Seven Shillings and
Money in Both Pockets, with music provided by a four-piece band called
Persuasion.
The elaborately dressed crowd included several admirals, a blue-gowned
woman clutching a stuffed pug (in homage to Lady Bertram of “Mansfield Park”) and a spectacularly bewigged Georgiana, the real-life duchess of Devonshire.
There wasn’t a zombie in sight. There were also precious few male
partners, despite the efforts of intrepid cross-dressers like Baronda Bradley,
a supply-chain logistics consultant from Fort Worth, Tex., and well-known
Austen society fashion plate, who was wearing a tweed jacket and paisley
waistcoat over a 1940s corset turned backward, to achieve a sufficiently stiff
male carriage.
“Every year people wait to see what I’m wearing,” said Ms. Bradley, who
had brought eight different outfits for the meeting, including the bonnet and
day dress she wore on the plane. “I really wanted to freak everyone out tonight
by going as a man.”
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